Finances meant that Frances brought her own lunch. “I had the grant from the Department of Veterans’ Affairs. At that time it simply had to be the best veterans’ program in the world! But I still had to do odd jobs elsewhere when I could. And I did everything, anything that came along. I worked part-time for a veterinary surgeon on St. Clair Avenue (Dr. Edith Williams), to learn my animal anatomy. It was very good practice. Mostly cleaning cages. I also got a job each summer as a counsellor at a summer camp, Camp Tannamakoon, in Algonquin Park. I worked there for years.”
The first year at OCA was an exciting time. No more “juvenile” high school art classes; this was the Big Time, the real thing.
“We were in first year together, the same class,” said Marnie. “We became friends, the way one does at school. With the end of the war, Frances must have found the atmosphere very free after her time in the navy, and I had come straight from boarding school, so we both had the feeling of being cut loose.
“She was not much of an extrovert — there are always lots of those around, among artists, or would-be artists. No, Frances was a serious, hard-working woman. And she was a woman, not a teenager. I was eighteen, she was twenty-three. There were many her age in that year. I think 1947 saw the biggest student roster ever, because so many veterans enrolled.
“Those first days were a very innocent time,” said Marnie, “compared to the student life of today. First of all, in the life drawing classes, I had to get used to the idea of drawing a nude model. Not much of a shock to people now, but back then I can remember thinking How can somebody stand up there like that? I don’t remember if Frances agreed with me.” (when asked, Frances, the pragmatic ex-sailor, said, “She can stand up there like that because she’s being paid for it.”)
At the end of her first year at OCA, Frances was struck by one of her first major illnesses, the first of a long history of medical problems. She spent three months in Toronto’s Sunnybrook Hospital battling a serious bout of infectious mononucleosis, a viral disease that attacks the liver. “It was a bad dose and I lost one whole term in my second year at art school, the autumn of 1948, but my wonderful Rosedale landlord kept my room for me. I don’t think the medical profession knew very much about mononucleosis in those days. I’d wake up and there’d be four or five doctors in white coats staring down at me, and I’d be thinking Oh, I’m gonna die! It took me a long time to get over it. I probably wasn’t eating properly, skimping on my food. Students do that. Food was not often a critical matter. We knew we’d live forever.”
In Frances’s days in art school, when the glass ceiling was made of reinforced concrete, some might wonder if women were really expected to be sculptors. “Just expected to get married,” said Frances, “and have children, and look after husbands.” But Frances did not encounter any such exclusion, at least not in the art world. Exemplified by art circles such as the Beaver Hall Hill Group in Montreal, and the Julian School in Paris, women had long since assumed a prominent role in the creative world, despite the frowns of the academies.
“The only resistance I found,” said Frances, “was in my own family. My father always felt I should be doing something else, and expressed that view in a way that’s become a cliché: ‘Art is all very fine, my girl, but what are you going to do for a living?’ And I don’t think I was the only one who encountered that, not where families were concerned.”
She felt her instructors at OCA were outstanding. “In Foundation Year, that was first year, there was Arthur Tracy, he was extremely good, particularly with techniques; Carl Schaeffer; Jack Martin; Will Ogilvie was my favourite, he taught drawing.
“And then there was our sculpture teacher, Emanuel Hahn …”
Emanuel Otto Hahn (1881–1957) was one of the preeminent sculptors in Canada. As head of the sculpture department, he taught at OCA from 1912 to 1951. Among his many works is the design for the Canadian ten-cent Bluenose and twenty-five-cent Caribou coins, still in use after seventy-five years. In 1929, Hahn won the commission for the Adam Beck monument which now stands on the median on University Avenue in Toronto. It was unveiled in 1934.
“The Beck sculpture is a great memorial,” said Frances. “Hahn was a wonderful craftsman. He taught me a lot about carving, and how to use tools properly, which was particularly good.
“But Manny Hahn was extremely difficult. He and I just didn’t get along, but it wasn’t me especially. Though maybe it was — I remember at one of his parties I refused to sit on his lap, and that was that. Crossed off his list forever!” Hahn had stormy encounters with others of the faculty. “Manny was just impossible to deal with. He was in his late sixties and really in his dotage. He retired (Frances’s expression was “terminated”) in 1951, the year I graduated. He had had life tenure, but he was simply too difficult.”
But when is a man all of a piece? Experience teaches us to extend to talent a certain consideration, to accept vagaries of conduct, to see their better sides. Frances herself saw his genius as a sculptor, his imagination; his superior skills that lent her own a breadth she might not have gained. She saw him as once a very good-looking man, though height-challenged, the once-handsome physique now lost to obesity. “I don’t think he’d seen his feet for quite a while.” His head was round, the nose short, and his temper shorter. “He made his own wine,” said Frances, “and had a little jug in his office. In the morning he’d come storming into the studio in a very bad humour. A few moments later he’d come out of his office with little round patches of colour on his cheeks, and he’d be quite jovial.”
While Frances recognized that, technically, he taught her a tremendous amount, she would nevertheless hide from him a piece she valued and wanted to develop. “When I was working on something, he would invariably come and tear it all apart and start it all over again. And then, of course, after he did that, the work wasn’t mine, was it? And that taught me a very important lesson.”
It was a lesson she forgot only once. In later years, Frances was to conduct night-school sculpture classes. Like virtually every artist who was ever born, Frances was constantly concerned about finances. To live creatively, she sculpted; to put bread on the table and pay the rent, she instructed in half a dozen different night-school carving courses in southern Ontario.
During one evening class, a student was having difficulty achieving a certain effect on a clay bust. Frances suggested what might rectify the problem, but the student couldn’t seem to grasp the idea. Impatiently the student threw down her tools.
“Well, show me!” she said.
Frances, forgetting for that moment the lesson learned at the hands of Emanuel Hahn, took an instrument and made a slight cut down the side of the bust, then worked for a moment on the planes of the head. “There,” she said, happy to have shown the student a valuable sculptural technique.
The student burst into tears. “You’ve ruined my whole day’s work!” she cried.
“And she was right,” said Frances. “I mean, even if it’s bad, the student has something no one else has. Even if it’s second class, it is uniquely theirs and the instructor has no right to go into that person’s mind and, you know, sort of shift things around. I never did it again.”
Emanuel Hahn had married Elizabeth Wyn Wood (1903–66) in 1926 when he was forty-five and she was twenty-three and one of his students at OCA. Frances met her in the late forties; Wyn Wood was still as lovely then as she was in the beautiful marble portrait Hahn created of her in the year they were married. “She said she married Emanuel thinking it would help her career, but I don’t think it did very much.
“I think she was a little suspicious of Emanuel — he was a bit of a womanizer.” Frances would sometimes assist Hahn with one of his castings, working with him in his Adelaide Street studio. He and Wyn Wood had adjoining studios. Both were art instructors, he at the Ontario College of Art, she at Toronto’s Central Technical School. “Yes, a little suspicious of him. When he was teaching, she would appear around the corner of the studio at the College of Art to see what he was doing. All of a sudden